hey guys i'm having martin in this break in the set and the chaos that's been easy to overlook this week marks two important anniversary events that still live in the minds of millions of americans and they were in one thousand nine hundred ninety three seventy six people died in waco texas when u.s. armed forces seized a compound housing the religious group the branch davidian it started off as an attempt to carry out a search warrant based on a tip of the group having a stockpile of illegal weapons as into a fifty one day standoff eventually federal agents used tanks to bust holes of the compound and pump and tear gas shortly after a mysterious fire ensued on the building leaving dozens of men women and children burned alive at the time the d.o.j. told the public that the fire was a result of a mass suicide and it took six years for the f.b.i. to admit that they are the ones who started the fire but to this day however no members of the law enforcement have ever been held accountable for this massacre

and on this same day two years later for the oklahoma city bombing on wednesday april nineteenth one thousand nine hundred five at nine am a massive explosion went off in the alfred p. murrah federal building which left a hundred sixty eight people dead nineteen of which were children and over six hundred injured the man behind the rest a terrorist attack was timothy mcveigh revealed that his decision to bomb them or a building was in retaliation to the federal raid on waco mcveigh was later sentenced to death by lethal injection here's a caucasian male so if there's anything that we can take away from this week's unfolding drama bloody history it's that terror has no nationality race or religion i was pretty upset. a little bit of rubber sheet or anything like that.

i missed this week's tragic mayhem when news story of slipped under the radar could have profound implications for american citizens i'm talking about the house passing the cyber intelligent cherian protection act yes this is the same bill that was first introduced back in november of two thousand and eleven and while it passed in the house then it was prevented from being passed in the senate it was a huge victory at the time for civil liberties activists who claim that the bill was an infringement on privacy and open the door for corporations to share private data with the government less than a year later everyone thought this bill was dead and buried and headed for reared its ugly head again just yesterday is this but overwhelmingly passed in the house and now await the senate vote but this time around the government prepared to address any concerns regarding the legislation a myth in fact sheet they provided says quote the bill has nothing to do with government surveillance rather it simply provides a narrow authority to share anonymous cyber threat information between the

government and the private sector so they can protect their networks and their customers private information so is this really the case and what are the implications of this if this does pass to cut through all the rhetoric i'm joined now by michelle richardson legislative counsel the a.c.l.u. is washington legislative office for coming on thanks for having me so michelle you just wrote a great article breaking down kind of through the rhetoric the newest version of supposedly received several amendments in closed door sessions i was hoping you could break down some of these that you wrote about what is the civilian control of domestic cyber programs well one of the biggest problems with this but is that it creates an exception to all of the privacy laws on the books right now so that companies that hold incredibly sensitive information like internet records can share it with other companies or directly with the government it's written so broadly though that they can go directly to military agencies like the n.s.a. and allow them to collect information on americans and. a very strong wall here in

the united states between our civilian and our military and we don't let the military act against americans on u.s. soil it has it's rooted in our very founding of our country and this is a very dangerous bill because it allows the military to start collecting information on americans and something that i forgot to say was that these are actually the main problems with the bill that you have outlined the amendments that were fixed yet for the build and move forward what about the limit sharing of personal information another issue with the bill is that it doesn't say that companies need to extract the personal information before they share the rest with each other or with the government and the idea here is that these companies may come across technical data that they can share that one effect or privacy some people call it the ones and zeroes but they really mean the technical data that doesn't reflect to you is a person can't be tied to you in your activities so we hope that as this bill moves forward they amended to make it very explicit that that personal data shouldn't be

shared in the process of this program and they incorporate collection protections on information what is i mean yes this is the idea that after it's share there has to be back in protections on the information so it's not misused for other purposes that this doesn't become a fourth door fourth amendment back door and there were some amendments accepted both in the committee and on the floor of the house this week that substantially address that problem although it's good to hear so as this book stands right now the government can search through the information so long as it's for an authorized purpose what are they deem an authorized purpose well there is the cybersecurity purpose but there are unrelated things now in the bill like crimes against minors or anything that can cause harm to a human being that can be incredibly and we're very concerned that that will allow the government to trawl through all the status looking for evidence of crime. that

right now they have to get subpoenas or warrants to access and is it physical harm or or any sort of harm i guess that's open for interpretation it's open for interpretation it's not defined in the statute but we are concerned that it could include all sorts of activity that while serious is just another crime and needs to go through the criminal process with all the attendant protections that that includes good point let's talk about what corporations are supporting so it's about right now eight hundred comcast time warner pretty much all the big wigs of the telecom industry what stake do they have in this bill the whole bill is set up as liability protection for the companies so that neither the government nor their customers can hold them accountable no one can take them to court they can't be prosecuted and there's just no recourse for someone if their information is shared so this is an absolute win for them they have no responsibilities they don't have to meet any standards and in return they get a free for all and they can share whatever they want and they can take almost any

sort of action in response and be completely indemnified and not be held accountable when when for them and i think a lot of people who fought for the first time around are thinking oh my gosh how is this coming back around reared its ugly head we just beat this and i think a lot of what had to do with the not passing was google p.d. i mean staging these online protests that we saw that really helped galvanize this opposition to the bill without that blackout from big web giants will we see enough of a unified opposition to defeat this that's a good question and the companies haven't mobilized against this this is really just a win win for them so they've supported this all the way what we do have working for civil liberties right now is one bomb administration they did issue a veto threat this week and it very explicitly said they want civilian control over the domestic internet they want personal information protected they want to make sure companies don't get just a free pass to do whatever they want with this data. so that is

a very strong card to have in your pocket and it's very rare to see the administration issue a veto threat on the basis of privacy the other thing we have going for us is that the senate last congress took a much more targeted approach and included many more privacy protections so hopefully those forces joining together along with advocates and people working on the internet can make sure that the final product isn't a violation of civil liberties of course there's so many more representatives in the house and the senate like you just said last time they were very staunchly opposed without these amendments so unless these amendments are changed should we or could we expect the senate to block it again i guess we can only hope yeah i think right now it's unlikely that we'll have much traction in the senate so now we're really looking at the long game here and what happens over the next year we understand that the senate is working on its own bill and we're really encouraging them to start where they left off last congress with some pretty substantial protections in place what happens in the long term when they go to conference and

work out their differences is a bigger question and it's going to take a lot of work from the advocacy community and citizens letting their congress know what they want all those bill definitely isn't going away we know that the administration is very fervently trying to pass through some sort of cybersecurity legislation and we just got a galvanized to really ensure that these privacy amendments are instilled i mean how likely is it though that if it did let's just say hypothetically it did pass the senate how likely is it that obama will veto the bill i mean we've heard this kind of rhetoric before where he said he'd veto the controversial n.b.a. amendment on the national defense authorization act and he didn't do that. well right now i think we have every reason to believe that they would follow through on it this is something that's been vetted through different agencies and at the highest levels and i know it wasn't issued lightly but i just want to cross that bridge when we come to it and the question is if it's. just a couple of tweaks what happens then yeah and we can't wait around until. well you

know what to expect that we ought to have to prevent this before it gets about point really quickly about thirty thirty seconds left but why do you think that's been so under reported in the media and i mean basically it's been passed through the same week that there's two major tragedies being covered virtually no media coverage that's a question and i don't have an answer this is a big threat to privacy probably bigger than the patriot act or some of these other expansions that we've seen and the thanks to you and some of the other reporters that is finally getting some coverage all right well let's keep pushing it through thank you so much michel richardson legal counsel to you. if you want to know i'm doing what i'm not going or you can check me out on twitter abby martin you like what you see you can follow me there you'll find all my tweets linking to segments from the show as well as random thoughts i had throughout the day and also please help breaking the set trending on the twitter sphere ok to help out some hashtags making good trending on the twitter sphere but only with your help so i had to twitter and check me out at abby martin knowledge take

a break from my preaching but stay tuned to hear my interview with jacob reams about how to go to the workplace safety standards may have played a role in the huge explosion and this week in texas. wealthy british style sun. spot on the. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to conjure reports on our.

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the international airport in the very heart of moscow. well twelve more bodies have been recovered from the site of the deadly blast at the west fertilizer company plant in the town of west texas a massive explosion that's left much of the small city in ruin officials say that sixty people still remain unaccounted for two hundred others have been left injured the blast flattened a five block area shockwave so strong the u.s. geological survey measured it to be on par with a two point one magnitude earthquake according to the company there were fifty four thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer put that into context the explosion that rocked oklahoma city in one thousand nine hundred five used four thousand

pounds of the same chemical if you haven't seen the video yet you need to because it's absolutely terrifying check it out. for. sure the. so how could something like this occur the facility that once reported the e.p.a. and writing that there was no risk of fire or explosion or to help me break down what we do know about the west texas explosion and the impact of neglected workplace safety standards i'm joined now by dr jake a public affairs and history professor at suny empire state college thank you so much for coming on my pleasure thank you for having me so jake up in two thousand and six west fertilizer company had been fined by the e.p.a. for not having a risk management plan how could company producing such a dangerous compound not have an emergency management plan and is the extent of the penalty really just a slap on the wrist well there are

a couple questions imbedded in that one that is it was supposed to have a risk management plan it clearly didn't. and we don't actually know really so i don't actually know whether it developed a plan afterwards i think has said that what it was what it was accused of doing several years ago was mitigated but we don't know what that risk management plan was we don't know really anything about it or if it was good enough the other the other question really though is. are companies doing enough and does the government have enough power to create create safe living conditions and working conditions and the answer apparently is not really. you know the occupational safety and health administration had not inspected the plant in five years i mean why do you think was neglected for so long is that commonplace for them to be so little oversight and such long time spans between inspections so combining the state osha state osha has and the federal osha there are only twenty two thousand twenty two

hundred and twenty inspectors for workplace safety in the entire country that means that each workplace could be inspected by federal inspectors or know by everyone an average of once every one hundred twenty nine years in texas it would actually work out to once every six. seven years which is a lot better than once every hundred twenty nine but it's still not very good is drastically under-funded osha is an agency that only started the one nine hundred seventy s. that has never gotten very much attention not never gotten very much love from congress or from administrations one of its sibling its nine hundred seventy sibling the e.p.a. has a considerably greater budget more somewhat more inspectors and actually one of the comparisons that's often made is has a much greater finding and criminal ability it's actually a bigger deal if you kill certain species or if you do certain environmental

violations then if you kill a worker it's amazing what you just outlined according to the u.s. department of labor i mean we're talking on average forty six hundreds of americans dying every year and workplace accidents why with so many deaths isn't there more priority to fully fund. i think that's an excellent question that has to do with our own priorities. that an average of almost thirteen a day i'm sorry thirteen a year a week and that's not even including the average the average of fifty thousand occupational occupational deaths a year that's things like diseases silicosis black lung popcorn lung things like that i think a lot of that is a lot of these deaths don't happen all at once they happen in dribs and drabs they happen from people falling off of tall ledges they happen on construction sites they happen when things collapse one person dies two people die and these are tragedies and they add up as you say to forty six hundred

a year or to fifty thousand a year if you include occupational diseases but we but individually they look like accidents individually maybe they look like carelessness on the on a level of an individual worker or an individual manager or an individual plans but when we look at it all at once when we look at. these forty six hundred a year are these fifty thousand a year we can see no it's more than we can see it's societal choice that we make not to care enough about these questions yeah it seems like we're seeing these types of corners getting time and time again you know whether it's with the pipelines the nuclear reactors i mean one does this kind of disregard purposefully become criminally negligent. well there are there are legal standards about about that and there are it is possible to get a criminal prosecution when when a worker dies although it's very difficult there are actually only been since since one thousand nine hundred seventy to two thousand and eleven there were about three

thousand three hundred sixty thousand workplace deaths and only eighty four i think that's right eighty four prosecutions so it's really hard legally it's really hard and i think the way we change that is by organizing right there's never going to be enough inspectors that there's going to be an inspector at every factory making sure at every moment that it's going to be safe. the only way this will happen is if communities are organized enough to say we don't want that. fertilizer plant or that chemical plant in our neighborhood it's too dangerous or if workers are organized there for empowered to say i didn't i only came to work here i didn't come to die no i'm not going to do that and say that and let's talk about organizing within the workplace i mean texas has the highest incidence of workplace related deaths it's also one of the most anti union states i mean is there a correlation here. i absolutely there is there's absolute correlation that union workplaces are safer workplaces. and you know let's talk about deregulation of

course specifically in texas once again i mean one of the most deregulated states what does rick perry saying that it's good and it's it's fair and predictable to have a regulatory climate i mean i'm just paraphrasing here what does that mean and when it comes to workplace safety is deregulation or e allowing the industries to regulate themselves a good policy. what no in general i would say it's not it's not good policy we definitely need government to make sure that we have workplace safety standards the passing of of the original occupational safety and health act in seventy two was was a really was and was an important move as was around the same time the passing of e.p.a. and it's important to see how this this explosion in west texas is both an environmental and a workplace disaster in fact the people who are most affected were not people who are working there people who live nearby that's almost the definition of an

environmental disaster and it's really not good enough to say oh we're just going to trust we're just going to trust the employers we're just going to intrude trust polluters if we don't make it expensive for them to pollute or have dangerous places right because to build you have to build that cost into into their cost of doing business yeah because at this point it's just a very small slap on the wrist for them to basically have a license to pollute and to kill i mean essentially that's what we're looking at when we're looking at these industries thank you so much for coming down breaking it down jake up public affairs and history professor at suny empire state college appreciate time my pleasure thank you. watching this week's harrowing story unfold it's been a nonstop drama. frankly it's draining look there's a lot of information swirling around out there about the boston bombings but until

we get the most important questions answered we don't know enough to make conclusions after many false reports and misleading suspects two brothers are from the identified one allegedly killed in a firefight with police and the other still on the run through zoltan in a police state style lockdown of the entire metro boston area with thousands of paramilitary troops and tanks patrolling the streets and the way that they've linked these two men is by narrowing down thousands of crowd sourced photos and matching it to surveillance cameras and although the establishment has no problem airing the deadly explosion frame by frame a thousand times the american public the actual footage that they claim links these two suspects to the bombing might not ever be seen in new york times says one video which officials say they did not release shows the two men walking slowly away after a bomb exploded while the crowd fled look i for one think that we should demand to

see this video the video that would clear up any misconceptions that these two men were indeed responsible the same two suspects that it turns out an interesting interest are actually chechen which is an ethnic group from chechnya a region in russia so of course pundits and politicians alike are a little perplexed at how to fit this new details of the war on terror narrative take for example what p.j. crowley former assistant secretary of state for public affairs had to say he tweeted this morning if the two boston suspects were from chechnya the next question is who sent them and beyond killing people what agenda. yes p.j. i know it's your job but please stop prematurely insinuating that this is some sort of global terrorism plot because again it's pure speculation but as we watch the details emerge from the case of the boston bombing it's important to think about this tragedy not only in can. and what we've seen here in the u.s. we need to put it in a global context after all the horror this country experienced in boston is shared

by many countries around the world on a daily basis take for example the deadly wave of bombings that have just hit iraq this week on monday attacks took place in at least six different provinces killing up to fifty five people and injuring three hundred more the day was so devastating that it's now been calling to black monday. and just today i woke up to three more tragedies strike in iraq one was an attack on a sunni mosque where moral shells and bombs killed seven worshipers and wounded fourteen others another took place on a shiite mosque with two killed and fourteen wounded perhaps the most tragic is the news of a suicide bombing in a cafe filled with young people enjoying pool and the blast killed thirty two and injured sixty five others think about that for one second you're leaving your place of worship or just sitting in a cafe with your friends and all the sudden your entire life is changed if not gone

in a split second and sectarian violence is relatively new for iraq a country that has had very little internal strife before the decade long us occupation and the violence is only amplified leading up to iraq's first elections and the u.s. withdrawal but let's move on to yemen another country that's encouraging the horrors of the war on terror to drone strikes targeted quote suspected al qaeda militants this week killing five people and as we all know a suspected militant according to the government is just any military age male so when we hear rhetoric such as a suspected militant we have to question it because we don't know who these people are and why they're being killed and there's one common thread of all this linking this international violence it's all over result of u.s. foreign policy and the us. our tax dollars at work here's the bottom line as we learn more about events and motives behind the boston bombings it's vital that we

don't fall prey to the same mental trap revenge because if there's one thing we know for sure it's not violence begets violence. and as always we appreciate you tuning into tonight's show make sure you keep watching our team and our team america for all the latest to real time updates on the boston bombings check out our twitter and our web site for those of you surfing the web you can keep up with all the latest at our team dot com good night stay safe have a great weekend and we'll see you on monday.

going to. throw the way things are going to republican texas and we'll hold better all from the state of texas texas has got its own.

fueling flames upon the rest. position. on the streets. to build a new. mission

to teach. only. the international airport in the very heart of moscow. the remaining suspect in monday's marathon attacks is captured alive after a fierce standoff with police in a boston suburb he and his brother he was killed in an earlier gunfight being

investigated for links with extremist groups in the north caucasus. meanwhile r.t. spoke exclusively to the mother of the two alleged bombers who says her children were constantly monitored by the f.b.i. and could have never carried out a terror attack. plus a nation at war against itself killings bombings and terror attacks set this thing for the iraqi elections r.t. reports from the heart of the unrest where al-qaeda flags fly over the past unit insurrection which even a decade long u.s. occupation failed to tend. and looming rather in bahrain ahead of the formula one grand prix antigovernment protesters clashed with police trying to draw attention to the human rights abuses in the kingdom.